Into the Go Slow

by Bridgett M. Davis

  “Oh.” Regret washed over her.

  He glanced at Angie. “I could take you to where it used to be. There’s no business in there now, but if you just want to see the room itself, I could do that.”

  “Could you?”

  “Sure.” He paused. “Actually, I’ve been single-handedly trying to start up The Voice again, but damn if there wasn’t another coup two years ago. Been hard to finance a newspaper through all this volatility, even though we need a strong press now more than ever.” He leaned on his horn again. “And my wife doesn’t want me to do it. I tell her, ‘Change doesn’t happen without risk,’ but she is not hearing that. She just wants me to stay put at the bank.” He swerved around the lorry, finally. “But my dreams go beyond that damn bank.”

  She held on as Chris sped forward. “Maybe because she’s American, it’s harder for her to wait,” offered Angie. “Americans are used to getting what we want when we want it.”

  He banged his fist lightly on the steering wheel. “That is it exactly.” He looked over at her. “I see you’re as smart as your sister.”

  She smiled. That was a compliment she’d never gotten before.

  “But my wife needs to understand that we’re a young nation and young nations need risk-takers,” continued Chris. “Just twenty-seven years ago, Nigeria was still a British colony. People want to forget that ours is a developing country. Hell it’s developing right before our eyes.” He glanced at her. “Like you. You’re young, you’re still developing.” He smiled. “I don’t mean physically. I can see that development is complete.”

  Chris’s flirting felt nice: a friendly, harmless gesture. A way for Chris to make Ella’s little sister feel welcome. “It’s really good to be here,” she said.

  “And it’s really good to have you here.”

  A light rain began to fall as they exited the highway. The area had large swaths of sprawling land. They passed by plots of upturned earth, homes in various stages of construction—some with walls, others with foundations laid. Hopefulness hung on the skeletal frames. He turned down a wide street, where homes of expansive size and design sat back proudly; he turned again, onto a paved road, its street sign reading, “Dukun Olapade Avenue.”

  Chris pulled into the driveway of a hacienda-style, two-story house. Through the moving windshield wipers she eyed the Olapades’ stucco home, set back from the road, accented by cement fencing and its own car park. A palm tree sprouted its fronds beside the driveway and, sure enough, a riot of bright pink bougainvillea bloomed along the front.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Angie. It was lovelier than she’d pictured it from Ella’s simple description.

  Chris beamed. “We had it built, moved in four years ago. When your sister came to stay, it was brand new; the cement had barely dried.” They exited the car, he quickly gathered her bag, and together they ran through the sheet of rain to the front door. He opened it, ushered her inside, and called out, “Bren!”

  Hot air rushed from the darkened hallway. His wife appeared on the stairway, slowly descended. She had shoulder-length hair, almond skin, and freckles. She wore a velour warm-up suit. She looked at Angie, squared her shoulders, then held out her arms. “Welcome!”

  Angie moved into the embrace, comforted by the sweatshirt’s softness against her skin.

  Brenda slipped her arm into Angie’s and guided her into the house. “Ella talked about you all the time,” she said in what could’ve been a British accent.

  “Did she?”

  “Oh yes. ‘My baby sister this, my baby sister that.’”

  Angie was so moved by that revelation that she had to swallow the urge to cry as they walked through the living room, plush green carpet underfoot.

  She held Brenda’s arm a little tighter as she took in everything. She’d imagined the decor inside a cosmopolitan Lagos couple’s home would be mud cloth and kente casually thrown over sofas and chairs—all the rage in Afrocentric homes back in Detroit. But the Olapades’ living room had no dyed batiks nor native art, but rather ornate, formal furnishings, much of it velvet or gilded or both. No artfully placed African masks, no local sculpture on the coffee table.

  Chris approached. “Angie, your bags are in the guest quarters out back. I have to dash. Welcome to my country!” He turned to his wife. “This meeting could run late.”

  “Not too late I hope,” said Brenda, locking eyes with her husband’s.

  “Late enough,” said Chris as he hurried out the front door.

  Brenda stared at the closed door before turning her attention back to Angie. “Let’s have a seat in the den, shall we? What can I get you, Fanta, Coke?”

  “Fanta sounds good.”

  She followed Brenda through the dining area and simple but modern kitchen to a back room. With its golden plaid sofa, wood paneling, and shag carpet, this space was utterly different from the living room, more rec room suburbia, circa the seventies. Angie liked its time-warp quality and happily plopped onto the sofa. She took a sip of her Fanta as Brenda popped a cassette into the stereo. Roberta Flack began to sing the closer I get to you, a song from back then, from that time. She sank into the sofa as if it were a friend she hadn’t seen in years. Rain beat against the windows.

  “So how long are you here for?” asked Brenda.

  “Just a couple days, I promise.”

  “No love, I mean how long are you in Nigeria?”

  “For as long as it takes, I guess.”

  “For as long as what takes?”

  Angie shrugged. “To learn things about my sister. Things I didn’t know.”

  A wrinkle formed between Brenda’s eyes, and then it disappeared. “Well, you’ve come to right place.”

  “Have I?” She couldn’t hide the yearning in her voice.

  “You have. Ella stayed here for a couple months. That’s plenty of time to get to know somebody. Or think you know them anyway.”

  “Did you and she hang out a lot?”

  “Sometimes, sure. She was busy with the paper, but yes, we did.”

  “She said you were good people.”

  Brenda looked surprised. “Did she?”

  “Yes. She wrote that to me in a letter.”

  “Well we were close for a while there. Real close.”

  “What kind of things did you do together?”

  Brenda smiled. “Well, we played a lot of cards! Especially during the rainy season. Like now.”

  “She and I used to play cards together,” said Angie. “Tunk was my favorite.”

  “You play Tunk?”

  “I do.” Because it had a simple premise—the player with the lowest total amount on her cards wins—Ella had taught Angie to count that way.

  Brenda rose, pulled open a drawer to the side table, and took out a deck of cards, their backs designed to resemble Ghanaian kente cloth.

  Her faux British accent now mashed up with black-girl speak. “Girl, no one in this damn place knows how to bloody play cards,” she said. “When she first got here, Ella and I used to sit around for hours and play. Drink our palm wine, listen to the rain, talk about the latest Nigerian craziness. It kept our minds together, you know?”

  She dealt them each five cards. Angie went first, pulled a king of hearts from the deck, tossed it out. Once again, the thought of Ella doing this very thing, right here with Brenda, made her hands tremble slightly. Brenda drew next, tossed out a ten of diamonds.

  “You know. I had several black American girlfriends when I first got here,” said Brenda. “We banded together like war vets. That’s how we felt too, like we’d gone through battle, come through it stronger, closer.”

  Angie pulled an ace, slipped it into her fanned-out hand. “And now?”

  “And now my ass is damn near the only one left.” Brenda threw out an eight of clubs. “They all went back home. Couldn’t take it her
e. Except for one, Lydia. Now she’s something. Moved to Lagos when she was forty, went to some witch doctor who she swears helped her find a husband and get pregnant; now she has two kids. A whole life. And she’s not the only up-in-age black woman I know who came here from the States and changed her fortunes. Got married. Started a business, whatever. You can do that in Nigeria. I will say that much for this crazy-ass place.” Brenda shrugged. “Anyway, Lydia doesn’t really speak to me anymore, not since Chris and I moved into this house.”

  “Because?”

  “I’m not gonna say she’s jealous. She’s living all right. But not this good. That’s the bargain when you give up your life back home. The deal is, you come here and sooner or later you live good. My sooner is her later and she can’t take that, I guess.”

  Angie tossed out a seven of clubs. “Ella wrote to me about how modern this house was, but it’s even nicer than I imagined.”

  “And if you saw where we used to live,” said Brenda, “This would really seem like a damn palace! We used to be crowded into one room. And it was rough. Let me tell you, I thought with my middle-class, black-girl self I was incapable of cooking meals on a hot plate and washing my clothes in a bucket. But I did it. Lived like that for the first three years of our marriage. In my mother-in-law’s compound, no less.”

  Brenda picked up a card, tossed it onto the discard pile. A queen of diamonds. “So yeah, I’m grateful to be in this house.” She studied her hand. “But I still hate a lot of things here, like the way folks drive—” she stopped herself.

  Angie studied the cards spread before her. “I don’t know how they let it happen,” she said. “The horrible driving.”

  “I’ll tell you how,” said Brenda. “No speed limit, no road laws.”

  Angie thought of that big lorry she and Chris had ridden behind, its precarious load.

  “And there’s absolutely no driver’s-ed—you can buy a driver’s license for a few naira,” continued Brenda. “Plus let’s not forget the rampant nepotism in the ministry of transportation and the rogue moto cops. That translates to total chaos on the roads.”

  “Still, they shouldn’t let it happen,” said Angie, grief taunting her like a shove. “It’s wrong.”

  Brenda was quiet before she touched the top of Angie’s hand, patted it. “Why’d you even come here girl, put yourself through this?”

  “Because I wanted to see it for myself.”

  Brenda nodded. “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “I do. Trust me, I do.” Brenda paused. “It’s the last place she was.”

  Angie sighed. “Exactly.” She felt a bond gel between them. “Thank you.”

  Brenda touched her hand again. It felt nice. “You want a cigarette?”

  Angie shook her head sadly. “I don’t smoke.”

  “Ha! Good for you. Lord knows, I don’t think I could survive this place if I didn’t smoke.” Brenda set down her cards, opened an ivory cigarette case sitting on the coffee table, and grabbed a cigarette. She lit it with a silver lighter lying nearby.

  “Is it really that bad here?” asked Angie. “I mean, other than the driving?”

  “It’s exhausting.” Brenda took a puff. “Back home, you don’t have to think about every damn thing you do.” She blew out smoke. “Here, there’s always something to worry about. If it’s not the constant power outages, and I could tell you stories about what I was in the middle of when NEPA shut down, it’s the—”

  “NEPA?” The bellhop at the hotel had used that same word. “What’s that?”

  “It stands for Nigerian Electrical Power Authority,” explained Brenda. “But folks say it really stands for Never Expect Power Always.”

  Angie smiled. Chris was right. Nigerians were clever with language.

  “Anyway, if it’s not the power going out, it’s the crime. Or the corruption.” Brenda placed her cigarette in an ashtray. “And the filth. The damn filth is everywhere!”

  She pulled up the sleeve of her velour sweatshirt, thrust her arm out, so abruptly that Angie ducked. Brenda pointed to a furry growth the size and shape of a small hot dog. “This is a fungus. A rash,” she said. “I do not know how I got it. Every day I put this stinky home remedy on it that Chris’s mother made for me with a bunch of herbs. It’s slowly, slowly getting better. But meanwhile, I have a fungus on my arm that’s growing hairs. I am not used to this. I grew up in a nice neighborhood in Richmond. But there you have it.” She pulled down her sleeve.

  Angie nodded in empathy as she held her cards aloft. “It was a brave thing for you to do, come here and live.”

  Brenda grabbed her cards, picked up one from the deck. “Brave or dumb? I can’t decide.” With her free hand, she picked up her cigarette, reminding Angie of Ella in the way she pulled on it. “On a good day, I remind myself that I’m a respected member of society. And I live in a country with a black president. Who knows what I’d be doing if I were back home, living under Reaganomics? Folks calling me a quota baby just for wanting the same things they have.”

  Angie thought of a white classmate of hers at the University of Michigan. “Some of us worked hard to get in here,” the girl said as Angie walked by. “And some of us didn’t.” Angie had pretended to ignore her. But she wished she’d turned to the girl and said, “Now that they let in your dumb ass, you can try to make up for it.” Ella would’ve done that. Fought back.

  She threw out a four of spades. Her card total was low but she wasn’t ready for the game to end.

  Brenda grabbed the card. “So, what’s your plan?”

  “For what?”

  “For being here.”

  “Oh.” Angie stared at her cards. “Just to be around the people who knew Ella.” She looked at Brenda. “People like you.”

  Brenda nodded. And then she said, “Too bad you didn’t come a bit sooner. You could’ve seen Nigel.”

  Angie’s cards went lax in her hand. “Nigel?”

  “Yeah. You did know he was here?”

  “No, I mean, not since—” she hesitated. “Not since It happened.”

  “Oh girl, yeah. He’s been teaching at the University of Lagos for the entire session.”

  “But I thought he … I heard, we heard that he was a foreign correspondent somewhere.”

  “He was. Well he is. In fact, he’s back in Nairobi by now. Classes ended a week or two ago, so I’m sure he’s gone.”

  “I missed him?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Brenda looked down at Angie’s exposed cards. “Call ‘Tunk,’ honey. You won.”

  “Tunk.” She couldn’t believe it. Nigel had been living in Nigeria all this time? And now he was gone? She’d missed him? By a week? Maybe I should go to Kenya, she thought.

  “You must be hungry,” said Brenda, taking a final drag.

  Angie shrugged, still in shock.

  Brenda put out her cigarette, rose. Angie followed. “Our houseboy Godwin is off tonight,” she explained as they entered the kitchen with its eat-in table and aqua appliances. She opened the oven door. “So I made pizza. In honor of our American visitor.”

  “Pizza sounds good,” said Angie, trying to recover from the news about Nigel.

  “It’s one of the many things I really miss from home,” said Brenda as she pulled out the pizza. “And fried chicken. This place has no real chickens, just scrawny hens, so the meat is tough. What I wouldn’t give for some Kentucky Fried.”

  They ate at the dining room’s massive mahogany table. On the wall hung an oil painting of Brenda as a bride, her hair short, traditional gown flowing. Made from flatbread, slices of American cheese, and tomato paste, the pizza had an odd, almost pizza-like flat taste.

  “Your hair used to be short,” Angie noted, nodding at the formal painting.

  “Yeah, that was before my weave-on,” said Brenda. “I love it. Makes m
y hair so much easier to manage. Only the part nobody can see gets nappy!”

  Angie looked at Brenda’s bone-straight hair. She didn’t know of any black women with weaves, except for entertainers like Diana Ross and Chaka Khan. “Is that common here?” she asked.

  “No, not too many women in Nigeria wear weave-ons,” acknowledged Brenda. “But you’d be surprised how many wear wigs.”

  Angie stopped chewing her pizza. “Wigs? Really?”

  “Yeah, in the god-awful heat too. Crazy.”

  “Sounds crazy.” All of the back-to-Africa women she knew in the States wore their hair natural. It felt like a cruel joke of some sort to discover that real African women wore wigs and weave-ons. She wondered what Ella would’ve thought of this. Ella who cut out her Jheri curl at the beginning of rehab, was wearing her hair in a short, fresh natural when she returned to Nigeria.

  “Listen, between this rainy season’s humidity and the harmattan rolling in kicking up dust, women need a hairstyle that’s easy,” said Brenda, as if sensing Angie’s disapproval. “Otherwise I for one would be washing my hair every day, in cold water no less—’cause like I said, you can’t depend on NEPA—so who knows when your hot-water tank will work.”

  Angie had in fact struggled with her own hair that morning at the hotel, finally adding a heap of gel to stave off the frizziness.

  “If you choose to get a weave-on, let me know,” said Brenda. She bit into her pizza. “There’s really only one woman I trust to do it here.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Angie, clear that she had no intention of having hair sewn—or was it glued?—to her scalp. As an afterthought, she added, “Your hair looks nice.”

  Brenda took a swig of her Coke, burped lightly. “Chris hates it.”

  After they ate, she and Brenda sat in the den again, listening to more Roberta Flack. When Brenda caught her yawning she said, “You’ve gotta be jet-lagged. Come on, I’ll show you to your room.”

  She led Angie through the kitchen and out a back door, where two cement structures, identical flat-roofed squares, sat a yard or so from the house. They entered one of the structures through a patterned curtain hanging across its doorway. Brenda flipped on the light. “These are your guest quarters.”